$2 Million Airtime, $13 Ad

The YouTube Effect has crept into television's mightiest showcase for advertising: the Super Bowl.

For the first time, viewers of the biggest football game of the year, Sunday's Super Bowl XLI on CBS between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears, will see at least four ads that were created by amateurs, rather than by high-end ad agencies.

For advertisers, consumer-created content is a cost-savings bonanza. Advertisers are paying more than $2.6 million for the most expensive 30-second spot in this year's Super Bowl, up from $2.5 million last year. Just to produce a top-level 30-second ad can easily cost more than $1 million. A commercial produced by an amateur, by comparison, can be had for the price of a plane ticket and a trip to the game for the winner and some post-production cleanup for the ad itself.

For the ad creators, it's a shot at the big time and an end run around traditional barriers to appearing on advertising's biggest stage. Indeed, it could be a career starter -- more than 90 million viewers are expected to tune in to the Super Bowl.

"What this means is: You've got some kid with a video camera and he's playing on the same field as everyone else, and he did the whole [ad] for, what? A hundred bucks?" said veteran adman Kipp Monroe, with Herndon's White & Partners. ...

General Motors made a similar move this year, partnering with CBS to create a team competition among five groups of college students with the goal of making Chevrolet's Super Bowl ad.

Students from Elon University in North Carolina, San Jose State University, Savannah College of Art and Design, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee were picked from 820 teams and asked to dream up a Super Bowl ad. They were then filmed going through their creative struggles. These "webisodes" have the feel of CBS's "Survivor," "Big Brother" and "The Amazing Race."

The students are shown flummoxed when members of the Chevy team tell them that their ideas are interesting but many are simply too expensive to film.

•	$2 Million Airtime, $13 Ad In the YouTube Era, Even Super Bowl Advertisers Are Turning to Amateurs The Washington Post, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007 Byline: Frank Ahrens, Washington Post Staff Writer

	Story also ran in 6 others:  Chicago Daily Herald, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Fort Wayne News Sentinel (IN), McClatchy-Tribune News Service and Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (IN)